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What Are They Saying?

What first changed my mind about staying monolingual wasn't learning more about the Philippines, but seeing a different side of California.

By Seth Villanueva
 
Even my parents didn’t seem to care that I barely spoke any Ilonggo, our native Philippine language of around 11 million speakers. Also known as Hiligaynon, it is originally from the Negros Occidental and Iloilo provinces, and is spoken throughout the Western Visayas region of the Philippines and various scattered overseas communities, my family being part of one. I abandoned the language sometime after starting school in Anaheim, where I grew up and where it was exceptionally rare to meet an Ilonggo-speaker on the street. I still remembered a few words and understood most everything, but I thought I’d be perfectly fine living life monolingual. Everyone spoke English.
 
Then I switched elementary schools. Until the 4th grade, I had attended a Lutheran private school where most of the children and their families only spoke English. Now I was enrolled in a public school and soon learned that English, Ilonggo and Tagalog (the national Filipino language) were not the only languages that existed. My new classmates walked down the halls chatting in Chinese, Spanish, or Korean, and I began to feel like an outsider, an exile without a cultural identity of his own.
 
 “What are they saying?!” I asked my mom one day after school. I believed my mom knew everything.
 
She shrugged. “I don’t know, that was Spanish…"
 
At that point I was fed up with monolingualism. I still understood most things in Ilonggo, so all I needed to do was learn to speak it. My frustration made me eager to learn and I basically taught myself: I’d try to make sentences from words I knew and would get help on structuring them correctly. When I couldn’t express myself, I’d ask for help.
 
When I came home from a Christmas visit to family in the Philippines at age 12, I felt proud of myself and my cultural and lingual heritage. Now, at a proficient level I could tell secrets to other Ilonggos that no one else could understand. I had completed my own cultural identity, one very different from many other Filipinos, but also like the others at school.

The writer is a senior at Troy High School in Fullerton. LA Language World (LALA) welcomes "First Person" and other submissions from readers.

Date Posted: 10/26/2009